


Harmony of the Spheres, Played out of Tune

by LostOzian



Category: Homestuck, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August - Claire North
Genre: Age Gaps, Amnesia, Bittersweet, F/F, Found Family, Harry August AU, M/M, Mental vs Physical Ages, Misused Philosophy, No Game AU, Philosophy, discussion of suicide, historical events, time loops
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-18
Updated: 2019-05-18
Packaged: 2020-02-28 12:03:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18756088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LostOzian/pseuds/LostOzian
Summary: Dirk requests a favor. Roxy puts some pieces together. Either way, Thanksgiving is ruined.--Or, a Homestuck AU based on The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North. Certified accessible for Homestuck fans who have not read Harry August; not certified for Harry August fans who haven't read Homestuck, but give it a shot, will you? :D





	Harmony of the Spheres, Played out of Tune

**Author's Note:**

> I'll have notes at the end too, but I want to re-iterate what's in the summary. :)
> 
> This is an AU idea that wouldn't leave me alone after I read "Harry August," a book about a man whose life restarts at the moment of his birth every time he dies, with full knowledge of the lives he's led before, and a lot of discussion of causality and the meaning of life. It's an incredibly deep, witty, complex, surprising book, and I highly recommend it for everyone.
> 
> This AU is basically, "what if the human kids looped lives like Harry August?" It has no spoilers for Harry August, but goes in-depth about the mechanics of the loops and what it means for their relationships to each other and their perspective on life. I blazed through writing this shortly after finishing the book, and shout-out to MostlyHarmless again for making sure the fic was intelligible to people who hadn't read the book. 
> 
> I hope you all enjoy!

“My mother’s name is Pearl Wilson, who lived in Houston, Texas at the time of my birth.” Dirk announced to the room in a clear, measured tone. “My birthday is December 3rd, 1969.”

In the hush that fell over the room, Roxy stared at the red eye of her martini’s olive like it would blink first. _This is familiar,_ she thought.

“Dirk, what in the blazes do you think you’re doing?!” Jane broke the silence first. “We can’t un-hear that!”

“I don’t want you to un-hear it,” Dirk countered. “I want you to do something about it. Well, except John. He’s temporally challenged in this regard.”

Roxy glanced from Dirk to the young man sitting at the end of the long table in the dining room of the Seattle-area Cronus Club. Well, calling him a young man was more a reflection of manners than reality. John looked about thirteen, but he—like every single other person around the table—was incalculably older. They had kept up this tradition for quite a long time, gathering up for Thanksgiving in the 90's when Jane's old life overlapped with John's young one. They made arrangements at a local Club, blended their centuries of cooking expertise to craft an enormous potluck of their favorite dishes from all their lives, and then chased the eclectic meal down with fine spirits and the sweetest cake Jane knew how to bake. Unfortunately, Dirk’s declaration killed the mood, and Roxy watched everyone’s forks and glasses freeze in their hands.

“So you’re twenty-six years old right now?” Jade quickly ran the calculation.

“Correct.”

“Huh.”

“That’s all you can say, ‘huh?’ Dirk just dropped his point of origin on all of our heads!” Jane exclaimed.

“Sorry! This is a lot of information to process! The math is easier to focus on,” Jade defended herself, frowning a little.

Dave spoke up from the other end of the table. “You still haven’t answered Jane’s question.”

“The one where she asked what the blazes I think I’m doing?”

“Yeah, that one, you smart-ass.”

Dirk kept his head level, like he was doing everything in his power to imitate a statue. “One of you needs to terminate me before birth.”

“Oh, okay.”

“Don’t you just say ‘oh, okay’ to him!” Jane snapped at Dave. “Why do you want us to do such a terrible thing to you!? We’re your friends, Dirk!”

“I have logically determined that my existence is a cataclysm. All of our existences are, actually, but this is a call I can only make for myself. So here’s me, making it. One of you needs to terminate my birth.”

 _…Okay, yeah, this is really familiar._  Roxy couldn’t put her finger on why. It was hard to think with Jane waving across the table at Jake and demanding he “Talk some sense into Dirk!”

“Uh?” Jake replied, his graying mustache drooping with confusion.

“What has been the point of all your ‘intimate reunions’ through the years if it didn’t give you some sway over him?” Jane asked. Her blue eyes held a steely glint, channeling the spirit of the elderly matron’s body she possessed. “Talk sense!”

Jake floundered, fiddling with his napkin. Across the table, John picked up his fork for more cake, and he looked kind of bored of Dirk’s request for assisted suicide. Then again, John was kind of an oddball.

“Dirk,” Jake started. “I think I speak for all of us to say that we would miss you terribly—and I would miss you quite a lot, in particular…”

“Jake, it’s fine,” Dirk cut him off, a little dismissive. “This isn’t about whether you love me or not. This is about the factual nature of our existence as Ouroborans and the logical reality that each and every one of our existences is a cataclysm. I’m just choosing to end my cataclysm, but I need one of you to help me do it.”

Jake’s eyebrows furrowed at that. “You’re not a cataclysm, Dirk. You can’t be.”

“Why not?”

“You’ve never altered the flow of linear time. Therefore, you’ve never prevented the birth of another Ouroboran.”

“That I am aware of,” Dirk added, like a correction.

“That… what?” The furrow on Jake’s face deepened.

“I’ve never been aware of ending any Ouroboran life, but the nature of causality proves I absolutely have, on principle.”

Jane huffed, adjusted her granny-glasses on her wrinkled face, and turned to Rose. “If you please, dear. You’re the only one who can manage when he gets like this.”

Rose shifted in her chair, leaning forward to take a more active interest in the conversation. Roxy took another swig of her martini rather than examine Rose’s face for whether or not this topic bothered her.

“Leaving aside the accusation you’ve levied against the rest of us through this logic that has determined every Ouroboran is a cataclysm—which I find deeply offensive, by the way—I have serious reservations about the validity of your conclusions,” Rose said. “Cataclysm is the worst crime our kind can imagine, on par with genocide for linear humanity. The Cronus Club as a whole would absolutely notice if you had done anything to accelerate technology or interfere with major political events.”

“We’re in agreement on what a cataclysm is. You can stop the baby talk,” Dirk told her.

Rose smiled patiently. “You can’t accuse yourself of being a cataclysm if you’ve never done anything cataclysmic.”

“I can’t say that for sure, because there’s no way to objectively determine the consequences of my actions.”

“Oh my fucking god,” Dave groaned. “You two are really going to do this? The intellectual dick-measuring contest?”

Jade folded her arms and huffed at Dave. “If it stops Dirk from wanting to die forever, they can measure brain-dicks all they want!”

“I appreciate your permission to dust off my ruler,” Rose said, while Dave trailed off with his own retort: “Do we have to sit here and listen to them do it?”

“Dirk, please listen to Rose,” Jane implored. “You’re not responsible for a cataclysm! You just can’t be!”

“You’ll need to show a lot of work for us to believe that,” Rose said with a smug tone.

The corner of Dirk’s lip twitched, and Roxy felt a half-drunk urge to punch him. Seriously, Dirk swaggers on in here, ruins Thanksgiving by telling everyone how to kill him, and asks six of them to at least attempt it. And there’s no way Dirk just impulsively decided to drop this on them all. Every time Dirk did something impulsive, it was an optical illusion of him finally acting on shit that he had been brewing on for months, if not years. Roxy didn’t always hate this about Dirk, but right now he was being unbearable.

“Okay. Let’s create an example,” Dirk said. “We are in the midst of the golden age of anime, the 1990’s. I could board a plane for Japan this instant to be in the heart of the unfolding cultural explosion. I could study animation myself, rise the ranks of a production studio, direct my own series, and leave my fingerprint on the medium.”

“So go do that,” Dave interjected.

“Not so fast. What sad schmuck is stuck on his ass in Seattle because a guy with knowledge of future events decided, in his own egomania, that he just _had_ to be in the room where it happens, and jacked his seat? Or what about the artist never hired because a dude from Texas used sixty years of another life to cheat his way into being overqualified as an entry-level animator? What would happen to Chiho Saito if I plagiarized her surrealist masterpiece _Shojo Kakumei Utena_ out of her head, because I saw it on DVDs that haven’t been invented yet?”

“Plagiarizing an anime probably wouldn’t create a cataclysm,” Jade spoke up, with the same tone she used when she was trying to work through a physics problem.

“Also, even if it would, you haven’t done shit like that,” Dave added.

“What I’m talking about are the ripple effects,” Dirk said. “There’s one way to kill an Ouroboran.”

“There’s two ways to kill an Ouroboran,” John spoke up. His voice was a little muffled from cake tucked in his cheek. Weird, actually. Roxy knew John didn’t like cake. He’d sample Jane’s in order to appreciate her masterful baking, and then not eat more. But there John was, fork to cake to mouth, over and over.

“Forgetting doesn’t count,” Dirk dismissed him. “An electrical-chemical lobotomy causes one lose your memories of all their lives, the process doesn’t terminate your existence. It just makes you a blank slate to start your lives all over again.”

“I mean, it’s _kind_ of like a death,” John mumbled, but he left Dirk to continue his point.

“If one of us dies, we just restart our lives at our point of origin, born again as we always are in the same place and time. The only way to end the cycle of an Ouroboran’s life is to prevent the circumstances of their birth. If they aren’t born once, they’re never born again. And the easiest way to do this is to terminate us in utero. Hence: Pearl Wilson. Houston. 1969. Hit her up in the summer. Please and thank you.”

“I see what you’re getting at,” Rose leaned back in her chair this time, fiddling with long necklace of pearls. “You’re implying that the micro-variations in your lives impact linear time enough to create conditions where Ouroborans are never born, but not enough to change the flow of human advancement. Therefore, you are a cataclysm.”

“Exactly. Thank you for getting it, Rose.”

“That’s fucking insane,” Dave said.

“It’s a logical reality that we all have to grapple with,” Dirk insisted. “And like I said, if you all are comfortable with it, that’s fine. Even if it’s not fine, there’s nothing I can do about it, except in John’s case.”

John had finished his cake. He reached for Jade’s, forgotten in the midst of Dirk’s epiphany, while Dirk kept talking.

“Now that I’ve worked all of this out, I am making the choice for myself that I want my actions to stop impacting linear time, because my actions can prevent others of our kind from coming into being.”

“Hold on, Dirk, you’re not being rational,” Jane spoke up again.

“This is the most rational I’ve ever been in my lives.”

“Stop that, buster. If there really were future Ouroborans that weren’t being born, we would _hear_ about it. Messages would be passed backward through time, child to grandparent, to let us know that the future was changing. We’ve had three cataclysms, and may we never see another, but as soon as people start disappearing, the message gets passed back.”

“We’re not hearing about it because the cataclysm isn’t on a large scale,” Dirk told her.

“Then it’s not much of a cataclysm, is it?” Dave groused.

“Wait a minute, you…” Jake spoke up again, finally catching up with the argument. “You’re asking us to kill you because you think you have _hypothetically_ been responsible for erasing someone’s existence? Not even a specific someone who you think you erased, just—the _concept_ of your actions mucking the timeline up enough to prevent a birth?”

Dirk shrugged. “It’s a risk I’m not willing to live with.”

“This is so cowardly,” Dave said, and there was Roxy’s déjà vu again. Like a flash of light or a drifting snatch of a song, she knew she had heard Dave say that to Dirk, and even the context felt right. After so long spent living, the sensation Roxy hated most in the world was déjà vu. She either wanted to know she had experienced something before, or experience it for the very first time. She slurped at her martini again to see if that would help.

“It’s not cowardice, it’s logic.”

“No, fuck that. You’re bored or depressed or anxious and too proud to admit any of it to the only people in the world who might fucking _get it,_  so you concocted a logical trap for yourself where you’re the root of evil and it’s now a moral imperative that we poison your mother with Roundup before her weed of a fetus develops a brain.”

“Roundup doesn’t exist until 1973,” Rose corrected.

“What the fuck ever. Face it, dude, the timeline is resilient. So long as no one gives the 1950’s the gift of microprocessors, you’re fine.”

“But what makes the timeline resilient? We’re so cavalier about death because everything always resets. We return to our points of origin born anew with our memories of previous lives. All the same linear people are born too, but without their memories. What if I walked outside and stabbed a little girl with a katana? What if her great-grandson was fated to be born Ouroboran, and that son never gets born because I killed the great-grandmother before she even hit puberty?”

“Your what-ifs are starting to boil my blood,” Jake interjected, losing patience with Dirk’s rhetoric.

“Look, we’re not allowed to change the future based on our experience and knowledge because changing things fucks up the timeline for those yet to come. But we _do_ change the future. We change the future all the time. When children come back telling us about good investments, and when we leave nest eggs for them, we’re changing the course of history, and we never change it in the same way twice.”

“I’m telling you, the timeline is resilient—”

“What proof do you have of that?”

“Rose is the proof!” Jade pointed at her with rising excitement in her voice. “Rose and her wife!”

“What _about_ my wife?” Rose asked defensively.

“Rose’s lives and her relationships with her wife serve as the best evidence as to why micro-variations don’t kill future Ouroborans!”

It was a game by now. In 1965, Rose always made her way to Manhattan in order to witness David J. Miller attempt to burn his draft card in protest of the Vietnam War. There, she always met a promising fashion student, who was also a hobbyist gardener, voracious reader, and questioning homosexual. Rose had loved that same woman for dozens of lives. She sought her out over and over, and as time went on, started to experiment. What if Rose didn’t introduce herself at the protest? What if she engineered a coincidental meeting a week later at a restaurant? What if Rose moved into the apartment above hers, then let her cat slip down the fire escape, which would—of course—need to be returned? What if Rose had a psychology practice instead of a publishing career? Or what if she called herself an unsuccessful violinist? Or a French heiress? How many stories of romance could Rose craft, with her beloved a linear constant and herself as a changing variable?

Roxy only kind of understood why Rose did this. Consistent touch-points made looping lives easier to live. They helped build a sense of routine. Roxy always tried to be near a television set in 1969 for the moon landing, and she liked to spend the 70’s in California to witness the birth of personal computers. But when it came to Rose and her wife, the experiments were drastic; sometimes the woman never fell in love with Rose at all. After one rough encounter with her entirely out-of-love wife, Rose had come to Roxy’s home to drown her sorrows, and as the wine flowed, Rose started to nod resolutely as she slurred, “Next time. Simple. I know her well. Protests. Gardens. Milan. I can… I can keep it simple.”

Rose never kept things simple, but Roxy had ignored that. She had just patted Rose’s shoulder supportively as she drained two bottles of Inglenook Sauvignon and then passed out in Roxy’s best armchair.

Around the dinner table, Dirk looked about as pleased as Rose that her notorious linear wife had become the new focus of the conversation. “No, you’re just proving my point more, that we can all take actions that impact the flow of time—”

“It’s not proving your point and you know it! You’re just being an obstinate asshole!” Jade said. “If there was one of Rose’s lives where her elaborate courtship impacted the timeline so much that it killed an Ouroboran in the future, we would have heard about it! You have to face it, Dave is right! The timeline is _resilient_ against anything less than intentional manipulation on a large scale!”

“Think of it this way,” Dave added. “No one in the past has ever fucked causality up enough to erase any of _our_ existences. It’s just not as easy to do as you make it sound.”

“Tell me this then, if the timeline is resilient, what makes it resilient? Actions have consequences, cause and effect, that’s just factually true. And we know that there have been three cataclysms that deeply affected the population of Ouroborans around the world. Three times, egomaniacs thought they could play God at the expense of wiping our future generations from existence. Are you all seriously going to sit there and tell me that the timeline is resilient to the point of _binary outcomes_ for interference? That absolutely nothing matters in terms of the timeline, until we reach a threshold, and then suddenly everything matters way too fucking much?”

“Yes! We are!” Jade insisted.

“How can you, a _scientist,_  essentially tell me without proof that the timeline is sentient?”

“I didn’t say it’s sentient—and how can you call yourself a cataclysm without proof?!”

Jane folded her arms across her chest and huffed. “If you ask me, you’re arguing that Ouroboran lives are all cataclysms, while at the same time trying to persuade us to take action on behalf of future Ouroboran children. Why should you care if you erase them if our temporal manipulation is intolerable?”

“I told you, it’s because I have no right to decide matters of life or death for other people, only myself!”

“Weather patterns!” Jake interjected. Eyes turned to him, and he immediately wilted. “Oh—sorry, that was rather loud, but… think about storms. The Caribbean and Indonesia, areas like that. Air pressure and cold fronts and evaporation and wind speeds all mixes up together, and most of the time, it’s just a passing rain cloud. Sometimes it’s a storm with lightning it in, sometimes the winds spin and it’s a tropical storm, and sometimes it’s a hurricane, but only rarely do large hurricanes gather enough strength to go anywhere that would be devastated by their might. The timeline isn’t sentient, it’s just weather, and we’re storms. Not a single one of us has the power of a hurricane. Not unless we try.”

Dirk finally fell silent, the flat line of his mouth pressed very hard and giving Roxy that eerie sense of familiarity all over again. Like there had been another time when Dirk went off the rails, philosophically speaking, and even when everyone proved his reasoning thoroughly wrong, he was unsatisfied. The memory was foggy, but Roxy had a distinct feeling that back then, Jane had asked Dirk what this was really about.

“What is this really about, Dirk?” Jane asked, her voice much softer now. “None of us are willing to do what you’re asking of us. You must have known that coming in.”

“Suicidal ideation is a cry for help,” Rose added. “Which better describes your situation: crushing ennui accumulating over a number of lives, or despair over the permanent impermanence of your existence?”

“I didn’t come here for psychoanalysis,” Dirk grunted at her.

“Well, you sure as hell didn’t come here for turkey,” Dave snarked.

“Besides, Dirk, you had to have known none of us would agree to kill you,” Jade told him. “We’re all in this cycle together. Born and reborn and reborn, and there’s really nothing we can do but try and make ourselves and each other happy!”

“Oh, yeah, how about this.” Dave sat up in his chair, his attitude flipping completely in the glow of a great idea. “We’ll take that trip to Japan. Found an animation studio, make anything we feel like, fuck if it makes money. A surreal, profound, and ultimately bullshit series, one season after another, with a vintage anime style so we know we’re not fucking with the technology of the arts. Enjoy all of anime before it turns into a mistake. Maybe shake Miyazaki’s hand.”

“I shook Miyazaki’s hand four lives ago,” Dirk countered, like that invalidated Dave’s entire invitation.

“You wanna shake his other hand? Bet you haven’t done that.”

“You guys don’t get it! It’s not a matter of combing through this bitch of an earth for the one unique experience I haven’t had! This whole existence feels like a cosmic joke and I want to stop being the fucking punchline! My life always spans from the dawn to the 70’s to the close of the 2040’s and I will never stretch outside of that!”

“Are you sad that you’ll never experience the future?” Jade asked. “I’ve been there too, I tend to bite it in the 2030’s and we’re on the cusp of so much amazing stuff then!”

“It’s not the _future,_ ” Dirk spat. “I don’t give a shit about the future.”

The déjà vu feeling drove into Roxy’s heart, deep enough to make her shiver. She looked to Jake, witnessing befuddlement on his elderly face while Roxy saw Dirk’s meaning like a neon sign. Jake had to be a child of the 30’s, a grown man in 1969 when Dirk’s existence began with infancy. Jake and Dirk’s own—how had Jane put it—‘intimate reunions’ were a fixture of both their lives, but Jake always had a life of his own before Dirk’s began. He saw the rise of rock and roll, the shortening of skirts, flocks of attractive movie stars at the advent of color cinema… For some reason, Roxy could clearly remember Dirk’s voice, scathing and full of pain, demanding Jake tell him how many “starlets” he fucked before Dirk’s birth, while Jake flimsily defended that he was always single in time for Dirk to be born.

As if Thanksgiving hadn’t been ruined enough by this entire conversation, Roxy knew if she didn’t speak up, Dirk would ask about starlets and everything would get indescribably worse. So at long last, Roxy spoke up and said the first thing on her drunk mind:

“Hang on. We’ve… done this before, haven’t we?”

A hush fell over the table as people turned to look at Roxy. The only one who didn’t was John. He had three plates of cake in front of him, two empty, and one half-eaten as he fidgeted with a fork, like he was trying to muster up the will to keep eating, even though he couldn’t bear to take another bite.

“What do you mean?” Jane asked, gently this time.

“I…” Roxy pinched between her eyes. “All of this is just… familiar. Too familiar.”

John dropped his fork on the table. “Yeah. Seventeen lives ago.”

“Bullshit,” Dirk said, but the word sounded like a reflex more than an accusation. “That’s bullshit.”

“It’s not,” John said. “You just forgot.”

Ouroborans always forgot the details eventually. Around a thousand years of lived memory seemed to be the limit where recollection collapsed onto itself and became a soup of experience rather than a chronology of record. Did they live in Canada, or just visit it? Had they first tasted escargot six or sixteen lives ago? Had that idea been theirs, or something a past or future Ouroboran had informed them about? Most of them tried to be at ease with the soup, but Dirk worked hard to resist it, dedicating large portions of his days to recording his life in sequence so he could better retain the memories after every death. Still, he couldn’t remember everything. Only a few Ouroborans could.

John remembered everything.

“Pearl Wilson, Houston, December third, 1969,” John repeated Dirk’s point of origin. “You gave the hospital last time, St. Joseph’s, in case it got close to the deadline or something and we needed a place where your mother would be guaranteed to show up. Though that’d be funny, if your mom missed your birth.”

No one laughed. Jade fidgeted with her napkin in her lap. “How did we resolve this last time?” Cutting to the solution seemed like the best way to go, since they had already wasted so much time being scared and upset at each other.

“Dirk did a forgetting.” John said. “It was close to the end of his life, 2020-ish. No point in returning to potty-training years sooner than you have to. Someone born around that time helped us make a forgetting machine with tech from like, 2100. Way better than a chemical-electrical lobotomy.”

“I wouldn’t,” Dirk protested. “I—forgetting is for weaklings who can’t handle their existence.”

“You’re asking us to _kill you_ ,” John reminded him. “It kind of sounds like you can’t handle your existence already. At least a forgetting is a death you come back from. If it makes any difference, you developed pretty much the same personality as before really fast, it was kind of crazy. Maybe that’s why everyone else forgot so quick.”

Dirk looked like he wanted to stay furious with John for daring to suggest that he would take an action so contrary to his own character, but he didn’t have anything else to say. Naming the hospital of Dirk’s birth was pretty damning evidence that Dirk had shared his point of origin with the group before. A different hush fell over the table again as they tried to remember Dirk’s forgetting, or how they had reacted. Dirk must have had to learn all over again that he was an Ouroboran, leading one ordinary, linear life without knowing he was strange in any way until his first death and rebirth. The Cronus Club had been founded to help Ouroborans help each other, so no one had to live their lives completely alone. What had they done to bring Dirk back into their fold after he ejected himself from it?

John leaned back from the table and sighed. “Anyway, best thing to do would be wait until you’re dying, do the forgetting, and we’ll hit you up later. I guess, if you want to die right now, I know the specs for the machine, but I’ll need time to build it. Just let me know what you decide, okay? Now I gotta go, I ate too much. Thanks for dinner.”

With that, John pushed back his chair and left the seven of them sitting there, reeling first from Dirk’s desire to die and second from John’s revelation that Dirk already had, seventeen lives ago. That’s a hearty lifespan for an Ouroboran anyway, and it gave everyone else in the room a new baseline for how old _they_ actually were. What did this mean about each of them, that something so consequential had occurred, and then been completely forgotten?

Roxy didn’t want to stick around either. She followed John out of the dining room without an excuse, figuring she didn’t really need one. The Cronus Club had its own little estate out of town, the kind of place that their collection of time-looping friends made good money on renting out for weddings and parties, when they weren’t making absurd money from strategically investing on the advice of children from the future arriving at their death beds with reminders to sell stock in any dot-com companies on or before March 10th, Y2K. John shuffled down the hall toward an over-designed reading room, and Roxy followed him, tipping on her heels a bit. She was a lot drunker than when she had put them on that morning.

John had sat down on a long couch, surrounded by tall bookshelves and very fancy volumes of books meant to match each other more than convey important information. He looked up at Roxy, and with a sad little smile, patted the cushion next to him. She sat, because the room spun less when she was sitting.

“I’m glad you said something,” John commented. “Last time, I was worked up, too. I don’t want any of us to die, after all. But… seeing it all over again… Thanks for helping them cut to the chase.”

“Of course. What are friends for?” Roxy leaned on the back of the couch.

“Pretty good way of interrupting, too. Pretending you were just half-remembering it. Did you have an acting career you never told us about?”

“I wouldn’t call it a _career…_ ” Roxy bit her lip, smudging lipstick, but at this point of the night it was probably smeared across her teeth like wine stains anyway. “But I seriously didn’t remember until like, the very last second there.”

“But you do remember.”

“Look, _you_ have to remember how drunk I was the first time.”

“Oh.” John looked crestfallen. “I guess I didn’t want to remember that part. It’s pretty lonely, that you won’t remember.”

Roxy sat frozen for a minute. For Ouroborans, the single biggest thing that made their existences tolerable was the fact they weren’t alone. They were rare, someone somewhere estimating one Ouroboran for every five hundred thousand normal births throughout time, but they found each other. They helped each other, muddled through their repeating lives and granted meaning to each other’s circuitous existences. No matter how many nights Roxy felt lonely or useless, she could never consider asking someone to end her life because if she did, she’d never get to have another Thanksgiving with her family. Even one that ended with bad feelings was better than nothing at all.

A few Ouroborans remembered everything, a rarity among miracles. Even knowing John was the same way couldn’t make Roxy enjoy her own gift of perfect memory.

Still, John’s comment made her feel guilty. She should do something nice for him. Try and recover this bummer of an evening into something sweet.

“I’ve lived thirty-six lives,” Roxy said. “I’m two thousand, five hundred, ninety years old. I’ve had six hundred fifty-seven birthday cakes and twelve hundred… nine. Twelve-hundo-nine birthday martinis.”

John snorted. “Cake is overrated anyway. My dad always bakes a ton when I’m a kid. You want to talk about cosmic jokes, his baking is what burns me out on cake before I meet Jane, but Jane’s cakes are so good that Dad’s taste bland.”

“That’s the woooorst,” Roxy agreed, in spite of how many worse things she could name than a father and friend spoiling excitement for each other’s baked goods. “So how old are you, huh?”

“Thirteen hundred and change,” John said. “It’s kind of crazy, I was in my fifth life when Dirk pulled this the first time. I was two-forty-six, pretty young, and I had never considered what… asking to die would look like, for one of us. But everyone back there is right, he’s just wrapped himself up in too much thought and not enough feeling. He’ll be fine after another forgetting.”

“Guess so,” Roxy said. She had never seriously considered a forgetting herself, not until this moment. She might as well get a second opinion. “Hey, would you hate me if I did one?”

“One what?”  
  
“One forgetting.”

John looked genuinely surprised. “Are you saying you… want one?”

“I might,” Roxy said. “I don’t know. I’ll see how it goes for Dirk. Really pay attention this time, see if I like the way it looks on him. It might be nice to clean-slate.” She reached out to thread her fingers through John’s, hers aged and wisened, his soft and fresh. It struck her that she’d forget this moment of asking for John’s advice if she decided to go through with it. “Maybe… if I start over, you can help me decide to remember with you. I could try to not be an alcoholic next time.”

John laughed. It sounded evenly split between a laugh of humor and one of discomfort. “Now, hey, a choice like that might alter the future too much. What will happen to the world if you aren’t soaking up all of the gin of the 1960’s and beyond?”

“Only way to find out is to try, huh?” Roxy said, patting John’s hand. “I’m not decided on it yet. I’ll keep you posted.”

“Thanks. And...”

“What?”

“...Never mind.”

John scooted close enough to lean his head on Roxy’s shoulder. They could hear wind outside, and the stirrings of a November rain starting to sprinkle the rooftop. The dining room was too far off to hear if the great debate of Dirk’s assisted suicide had ended or continued.

Roxy closed her eyes and shifted to hold John close, recalling what it had been like to see photos of the surface of the moon for the first time. She wondered what it might be like to see them for the first time again.

**Author's Note:**

> Haaaaay look I told you there'd be notes at the end :D 
> 
> I have had almost total radio silence on this account since finishing Blood Stained Knight. Participated in a few gift exchanges, but didn't make much of it. I now have two original novel drafts in very different genres (High Fantasy Political Adventure and YA Contemporary Vampire Conspiracy) and while I've made a lot of progress editing, both projects are kind of stagnant right now. Publishing is hard, y'all.
> 
> I am also working in a new job, which I do love! More office management, but in a culture where everyone is really appreciative and supportive of my role, and I do NOT have responsibility over invoices, HR, IT, email listservs, groceries... Just executive meetings, office supplies, and parties. :) Much happier overall.
> 
> I have no idea if I'm going to write more fanfiction at this point? I feel like I tried to swear it off a while ago, but honestly, if something excites me or if it keeps me writing when I'd otherwise be writing nothing, I don't think I should be so scared of it. That said, I also don't have plans to write more right now. And no plans to read the Homestuck epilogues either, I scanned chapter 1 and kind of made a choice that I just... don't want to be part of that experience! XD I would love to hear snarky out-of-context comments about shit that happens though, that sounds hilarious.
> 
> Anyway, I hope you are having a fantastic day!!! Love and hugs and happy Saturday ^_^


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